just squirrel fashion, until I forgot what I had or where I put
them. You cannot know what joy I'm going to have in selecting just the
essential books, the ones I want by me for daily companions. All the
others, I see now, are temporary rubbish."

"And you've made your selections?"

"No, but I'm making them. You'll laugh when you come next time and I
show them to you. Oh, I am going to be stern with myself. I'm not going
to put a single book in that case for show, nor a single one to give the
impression that I'm profoundly interested in Egypt or Maeterlinck or
woman suffrage, when I'm positively not."

"It's terribly risky," I said.

"And I'm terribly reckless," she responded.

As I went onward toward the town I looked back from the hilltop beyond
the big house for a last glimpse of the reconstructed barn, and with a
curious warm sense of having been admitted to a new adventure. Here was
life changing under my eyes! Here was a human being struggling with one
of the deep common problems that come to all of us. The revolt from
things! The struggle with superfluities!

And yet as I walked along the cool aisles of the woods with the quiet
fields opening here and there to the low hill ridges, and saw the cattle
feeding, and heard a thrush singing in a thicket, I found myself letting
go--how can I explain it?--relaxing! I had been keyed up to a high pitch
there in that extraordinary room, Yes, it _was_ beautiful--and yet as I
thought of the sharp little green gate, the new gable, the hard, clean
mantel with the cloisonne vase, it wanted something....

As I was gathering the rowen crop of after-enjoyment which rewards us
when we reflect freshly upon our adventures, whom should I meet but
Richard Starkweather himself in his battered machine. The two boys, one
of whom was driving, and the little girl, were with him.

"How are you, David?" he called out. "Whoa, there! Draw up, Jamie."

We looked at each other for a moment with that quizzical, half-humorous
look that so often conveys, better than any spoken words, the
sympathetic greeting of friends. I like Richard Starkweather.

He had come up from the city looking rather worn, for the weather had
been trying. He has blue, honest, direct-gazing eyes with small humour
wrinkles at the corners. I never knew a man with fewer theories, or with
a simpler devotion to the thing at hand, whatever it may be. At
everything else he smiles, not cynically, for he is too modest in hi